Post your favorite shell commands!

[Daniel]

Post your favorite shell commands here! (Or just ones that you like.) If there are multiple commands that you like a lot, post them all! Make sure that you include a description of what the commands do.

ls /usr/bin | grep <command I want to search for>  (this command searches in /usr/bin for commands or parts of commands. this is useful if I want to find commands starting with "pkg" for instance)

/sbin/vsuper  (I like how you can run programs as root with this. (Useful if you write your programs/scripts that need to be run as root))

[GrannyGeek]

df -h
gives the size of mounted partitions, used space, and free space in human-readable form (gigabytes and megabytes)

apropos sometopic
lists files that are related to that topic

[tomh38]

more ~/Documents/somefile.txt

[rbistolfi]

find

[nightflier]

mc

It's command line cheating. Gives you a GUI in a text terminal.

[M0E-lnx]

vim <file>

[bigpaws]

Is there anything better than cat?

Bigpaws

[M0E-lnx]

Is there anything better than cat?

dog ? 
J/K

[Daniel]

Please make sure you include either a description of the command or a reference link to explain the command. I'm thinking of newbies here who might find these commands useful but might not know what they do or how to use them.

[uelsk8s]

sed has to be my favorite, maybe because I know I will never fully use all of its functionality

here are some more: http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/Uelsk8s/test/

[sledgehammer]

I saw something on the forum the other day about automating this, but til I get time to try it, my favorite shell command is:

root:# hibernate -F /etc/hibernate/ram.conf

Saves some battery.  I think this suspends to memory not to disk.  There is probably another one to put the computer into a deeper sleep.

John

[stefanek]

Using imagemagick to convert a pdf file to jpegs:

convert -units PixelsPerInch -density 200x200 infile.pdf outfile.jpg

will produce:  outfile-1.jpg, outfile-2.jpg.......depending on the number of pages.

[kidd]

alias is a command provided by your shell.  So it's not like most of the commands that have been already posted which are utilities that may be in your /usr/bin or /bin (see which and locate commands to find out where a given file is in your path)

I use zsh, which provides some interesting features regarding aliases.  AFAIK, bash alias command lets you bind one word to any other command (even piped commands), so you can write your own kind of macros.  Zsh's let you write partial aliases, so you can bind T to '|tail' and build complex commands from many aliases, and combine them with plain commands.

Here I paste the relevant part of my .zshrc

Code:

alias -g TL='| tail -20'
alias -g T='| tail'
alias -g tr='-ltr'
alias -g X='| xclip'
alias lsd='ls -d *(/)'
alias vimblog='vim ~/blog/`date +%F`.txt'
alias \:q=exit
alias lst='ls -ltr'
alias ls='ls  --color=auto'
alias sshuni='ssh alu9854@foolab.baruni.es'
alias screenuni='screen -t sshuni -c ~/.screenrc2'

inside the expanded aliases, you can find many of my preferred commands (being used very often made me put them into aliases, to shorten them).

Drop a line if you want further info on those.

[carsten]

xkill 

Carsten

[Daniel]

xkill 

Carsten

I very much agree. That is one thing that I especially like a lot about linux, you can "kill" a program and it almost instantly goes away. In Windows, you can click "End Now" and it might end the program but usually not immediately.